Highways England has completed £7 million flood resilience scheme for the A66 road in Cumbria.

Although the A66 generally copes well with prolonged rainfall it was affected by flooding from the lake during the storms of November 2009 and again in December 2015.

The highways agency has delivered a series of major engineering improvements, including raising carriageways, near and alongside the lake to improve severe weather resilience.

New drainage culverts under the road show how high the carriageway has been raised

Highways England project manager Peter Gee said:

“This is a significant investment in the county’s road network and will provide even greater resilience during severe weather incidents – keeping local people and the economy on the move.”

“Working to deliver these improvements at five different sites has been a major engineering and project planning challenge – not least in raising the height of the carriageway by almost 1.5 metres in places.”

In all, five sections of the route, a mix of dual carriageway and single carriageway sections, have improved since the project started last September.

The phases included:

• £1.5 million spent on raising the eastbound and westbound carriageways by 70 centimetres at Embleton where it runs alongside Dubwath Beck.
• £600,000 realigning and raising the westbound carriageway alongside the lake near Smithy Cottage
• £2 million and £1.7 million projects to raise the carriageway alongside the lake’s 2 Osprey-watching sites alongside the lake near Thornthwaite
• £1.1 million stabilisation work along the rock face along the westbound carriageway to prevent severe weather land slippage

Raising the carriageway alone – over a total length of 1.6 km – plus resurfacing a total of 3.2 km of the road, has involved using 31,000 tonnes of surfacing material. The work has also involved installing:

• 1 km of new kerbs and drainage
• 250 metres of gabion wall
• 6 new flood relief culverts and 800 metres of filter drain
• 1600 large soil nails to improve embankment stability
• 2,550 square metres of rock netting

The completion of the work around Bassenthwaite Lake follows the delivery of a similar, £1 million project in March along the A590 at Lindal-in-Furness.